Guess which of the following are regular parts of my day:
a) Driving 4 miles to throwaway fish scraps so that the bears don’t break into my house and eat me
b) Showing grown, slightly intoxicated 50 year-old men how to do laundry
c) Running to the grocery store two times a day at all hours
d) Watching the clouds roll over the most amazing mountain views I have ever seen
e) All of the above
If you are a super sleuth and guessed e) then congratulations you win!
Yes, I made it, I’m in Sitka, Alaska running a fishing lodge for the summer. Alaska has been on my bucket-list of places to live for as long as I can remember so of course I jumped on the job opportunity. I’m up at exactly 4:20 every morning to fill coffee thermoses, grab the lunches I packed the night before, get guests and crew out the door, clean up the kitchen and go back to bed for three hours. It’s the dream. When I’m not cleaning or running pick-up/drop-off at the airport I have the whole day to myself to photograph, read, explore, or simply sit on the big leather couches and watch the weather shift over the ocean and distant mountains.
It’s so rhythmic and secluded up here you can almost pretend the outside world doesn’t exist.
Almost.
Thankfully Twitter keeps me up to date. And since today is national environment day and since I’m surrounded by my favorite environment and since I have your attention I thought I would bombard you with pictures of nature and say-
THE PARIS AGREEMENT
IS REALLY
IMPORTANT
Do you get it now? Maybe in the dry, arid, environment of Mars where Trump is from (since he’s certainly out of this world) nature doesn’t matter as much. Maybe since Mars doesn’t have a breathable atmosphere he doesn’t realize how important keeping ours intact is. Maybe underneath all that spray tan he can’t feel the heat of the rays which are slowly melting our polar ice caps. Maybe these are all viable reasons for why he pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement but they are not viable reasons for why we should go along with it.
Alaska is beautiful. It is everything I could have ever dreamed of. But it will all be gone if we don’t step up and take responsibility for our actions.
Here’s one last picture of a mountain in case you don’t believe me
I’ll be using Instagram as a miniblog platform while I’m up here. Follow me at @leeslens to stay up-to-date on my latest adventures and photography!
Kesia Lee 
Your photographs are awesome! Alaska is so beautiful ☺️☺️
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Kesia, I too had always dreamed of going to Alaska. Good for you for grabbing the opportunity!! Thank you for sharing its beauty and your thoughts.
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You might be interested in the take of the folks at the Greentech Media podcast on the US pulling out of the Paris Agreement. Jigar Shah, founder of Sun Edison and CEO of the Carbon War Room said that if Trump’s actions motivate people to actually do something about climate change when before they were doing nothing, then he would give him a medal. The Paris Agreement was a sham with low, voluntary goals that we would have met without any treaty. Plus, because they were voluntary, most mayors and states weren’t doing squat to implement them.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/covering-americas-climate-troll-in-chief
People who say they care about climate change talk a good game, but most are just hypocrites, IMO. How many people do you know who have ever taken an in-state vacation because they care about the environment? Rich westerners travel. For centuries being well-traveled was the sine quo non of being cultured, educated, and by extension wealthy. That belief persists among upper and upper middle class Americans: it is how they maintain their status. However, how does one justify that when “the calculations show that a roundtrip flight from, say, Denver to New York produces the equivalent of nearly a year’s worth of emissions from a car, and more than the annual emissions of an average person living in India.”
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/every-time-you-fly-you-trash-the-planet-and-theres-no-easy-fix/
Personally, I will believe Americans care about climate change when they turn down their thermostats and start taking in-state vacations. Those actions taken en masse would do an order of magnitude more to prevent climate change than anything staying in the Paris Agreement would accomplish. We use energy in almost everything we do, from buying clothes and books to heating our homes to transportation. I’ll believe that people care about climate change when they start actually making sacrifices in a meaningful way.
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